War on/over Science thread

This is the promised open thread on science. If you want to defend or attack climate science skepticism, take a stand on intelligent design, argue about passive smoking or whatever, here’s your chance. No coarse language, and try to keep it civilised.

Anyone who does wish to submit to Nature, please be sure not to address any systematic failing on the part of climate scientists, lest you receive a response like this:

Natureâ€™s excuse this time? Editor Nicki Stevens wrote:
we have regretfully decided that publication of this comment as a Brief Communication Arising is not justified, as the concerns you have raised apply more generally to a widespread methodological approach, and not solely to the Hegerl et al. paper
Yes, you read that right. Because everyone else has been doing much the same thing, they arenâ€™t interested in ensuring that the stuff they publish is valid.

As someone with a great deal of experience in publishing, this comment from the editor does not strike me as at all surprising. The editor is saying that the submission purports to be a brief communication on a particular paper. But it is not: it is an attack upon a methodology that is widespread in the field. That is sufficient grounds to reject it as it stands. Moreover, it is very likely that given that it is an attack upon a widespread methodology, it is unable to achieve its aims as a brief communication. Generally, well-established methodologies do not employ obvious fallacies or any other errors that can be very easily demonstrated. Hence there is a second reason for rejection: that the paper likely does not achieve its aim. Finally, as a recent study on referee’s reports in the sciences noted (I don’t have the reference to hand) rejections almost never attempt to be exhaustive. They give a sufficient reason for rejection, even if there are multiple sufficient reasons.

Neil, as someone who has a great deal of experience in publishing (as author, reviewer and editor), I can tell you that in the harder sciences Nicki Stevens comment is way out of line.

Imagine:

Dr. Einstein, we have regretfully decided that publication of your Special Theory of Relativity as a Brief Communication Arising is not justified, as the concerns you have raised apply more generally to a widespread methodological approach [Newtonian Mechanics], and not specifically to the Hegerl et al. paper.

“Generally, well-established methodologies do not employ obvious fallacies or any other errors that can be very easily demonstrated. Hence there is a second reason for rejection: that the paper likely does not achieve its aim.”

As a reviewer, your prior bias should never be a reason for rejection. If the paper does not achieve its aim, you point out the error and that contributes to your reasons for rejection.

Deniers, in the face of evidence, are simply being religious, in the sporting team sense of the word, where reality is a social construction, and whoever can grab the political football in a game of keepings-off (for the longest times) wins.

Its all because we lack an organ for truth. In its place, we substitute our favourite bias, because without that push we would not move at all, and reality would not be noticeable at all.

Deniers are no different to the rest of us, they are just out of luck on a particular issue, and their innate preferences and tribal paraphernalia are sidelined. Depending how obsessive or neaurotic they are they will not give up on it (read refuse to learn, adapt, change).

There is a general tendency, especially evident in JQ’s comments setting up this thread, to imply that “the Science” of global warming is a closed book, like the Koran. But as Barry Ninham (one of Australia’s most noted scientists) noted at a recent seminar, just as the Ptolemiac system was incompatible with placing man on the moon, so more recently other closed books have had to be reopened, as with the classical textbook theories of solutions (eg of electrolytes etc) which now prove to have been seriously flawed and actually wrong, because they overlooked Hofmeister effects, as crucial to proper understanding as Mendelian genetics. Ninham also mentioned how the “all important role of dissolevd atmospheric gas on ‘hydrophobic interactions'” has been ignored, with a mistaken general reliance on Euclidean geometry. He added “it’s the same for the magnetic field and standard model of the sun, which are central to climate change, and for photosynthesis…The books have to be rewritten”.

One of the books that will sooner or later have to be rewritten is Houghton’s Global Warming. At Fig.2.4 he has a wildly misleading depiction of the atmosphere purporting to show thermal radiation in the infrared region and the contribution of different gases to the radiation. Here the GHGs, H20, CH4, N2O, O3, and CO2 are implied to outweigh the oxygen and nitrogen that are known to form 99% of the atmosphere by volume, and each of the GHG dutifully sticks to its alloted region, instead of being well mixed. When Houghton produces a probabilistic model showing how infrared radiation is mostly blocked by the 1% of GHG, when for any wavenumber the probabilities are that it will miss the GHG, perhaps we could progress. Likewise Houghton fails to inform us what it is the rising CO2 displaces from the atmosphere. Is it oxygen or water? If the latter, the rising CO2 will reduce the H2O and its claimed positive feedback effect. Houghton also fails to explain why when both Mars and Venus have atmospheres consisting almost wholly of CO2, they have very different climates. He notes the presence on Venus of almost pure sulphuric acid. He attributes Venus’ “runaway” greenhouse climate to its water vapour which may well explain its very high temperatures. But then if CO2 is displacing H2O here….? JQ tells us to submit to Nature, which is probably wholly staffed by old mates or sycophants of Houghton. Houghton’s book by the same token was never peer reviewed by economists, even though much of it comprises his own wayout theories of economic development and cost benefit analysis.

Re JQ’s new thread (and his failure as yet to deliver on his promised response to the Stern Reveiw), “scientific predictability also raises the question of the scientist’s
ethical responsibilities. His conclusions must be guided by respect for
truth and an honest acknowledgment of both the accuracy and the inevitable
limitations of the scientific method. Certainly this means avoiding
needlessly alarming predictions when these are not supported by sufficient
data or exceed science’s actual ability to predict. But it also means
avoiding the opposite, namely a silence, born of fear, in the face of
genuine problems”.
–Pope Benedict XVI, 6 November 2006

It is not the purpose of this memo to criticise my fellow scientists. It is to point out that in my view, there is a strong possibility that current climate change science and the role played by scientists in this field, are likely to be closely scrutinised in the months to come.

Honesty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It exists at different levels â€“ at home, at work, and all the way through to international level. Generally, honest scientists have problems when they enter the political arena and have to leave the shelter of the purely academic environment.
I believe that the UK government made a big mistake on this whole global warming issue. In order to pursue their international agenda they started manipulating science. It is now becoming clear that they not only encouraged science that pointed to human causality of global warming, but they actively discouraged, and more recently tried to suppress, scientific endeavour that questioned this.
An item hot off the press is that the UK Foreign Minister Margaret Beckett held a news conference yesterday 9 November in which she likened the voice of global warming sceptics to Islam terrorists. She went on to criticise the media for what she termed â€˜Wheeling out a sceptic to get a headlineâ€™.
The Weather Action news release continued:
“Beckett is shamefully ignorant of science and its workings. Politicians trying to control scientists spells the end of free-thinking and scientific advance. Climate sceptic scientists are being gagged and victimised in many countries including the UK and USA. Bizarrely scientists who are beneficiaries of the burgeoning climate crisis hype industry are claiming to be threatened, but that is just absurd. They are very well funded, the contrary view is not.

International science on this subject is dominated by scientists in the fields of climatology and the environmental sciences. Not only were those of us in the applied sciences left out in the cold, but there was a deliberate policy to exclude us from the agendas of national conferences on this subject. It was applied at the Exeter conference early last year and I personally experienced it when my presentation to interested parties in Oudtshoorn was cancelled earlier this year.
The proceedings of the International Panel on Climate change (IPCC) are also dominated by the views (honest but disingenuous) of those in the natural sciences.

Then the green groups such as the WWF saw an opportunity to advance their causes. Human beings are responsible for destroying the environment by continuing to pollute the atmosphere with the undesirable greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) generated by their coal fired power stations, transport and industrial activities. Something has to be done about it they claimed.
Faced with this dilemma, scientists in the natural sciences had to make a choice. They could follow the green agenda, or the political agenda, or the human welfare agenda, or their consciences as scientists. These are incompatible. The argument, if you are not with us you are against us is a powerful persuasive tool. But it is totally abhorrent to the fundamental scientific objective which is to search for the truth wherever it lies.

Then, in my opinion, the UK authorities made their biggest mistake. The Kyoto Protocol is based on scientific methods. It was flagging as uncommitted nations particularly the USA and Australia, refused to come on board and the major developing nations India and China remained exempt. So the UK authorities decided to reinforce their position with the economic argument. They appointed Nicholas Stern, a civil servant and internationally respected economist, to produce an economic review.
Sternâ€™s point of departure was the IPCC (2001) reports despite some protests (mine included). He then exaggerated the scientific consequences of global warming, and applied equally extremist economic factors such as the assumed interest rates. His projected costs to the world economy if no action was taken to reduce the global GGEs were horrendous and were clearly intended to frighten all nations into taking action ahead of Nairobi.
It has had the opposite effect. Faced with the huge costs that could damage national economies and reduce funds available for poverty alleviation, nations are more cautious than ever to come on board.
To make matters worse for the UK, economists the world over, including those in the UK, are up in arms. They are tearing up the Stern Review page by page.
The timing of the Stern Review preceded by the edicts of the Royal Society was clearly intended to influence the nations attending the Nairobi Conference. They would have to accept the need for costly measures to control their GGEs. The costs of these measures will dent national economies.
Stern emphasized that if these counter-measures are to succeed, they will have to be applied by all nations of the world, rich as well as poor. But developing counties by definition have other priorities for their limited budgets.
As a result of this unseemly pressure by the developed nations of Europe, universal action to control GGEs seems remoter now than ever.

I believe that there is now a strong possibility that this whole climate change issue will come under close scrutiny in the months ahead internationally and then in this country. The next IPCC assessment is due to be published in February. Unlike its predecessor issued in 2001 it will not achieve international recognition. All conclusions will come under the microscopes of the greenies, the applied scientists, and now the economists at both individual and national levels. There is no way that it can possibly convince all these groups.

Enough philosophising. Here are some extracts from various sources during the past three days in the order that they were received, mainly from CCNet.

7 November
THE DILEMMA OF GLOBAL WARMING VS ECONOMIC GROWTH
It seems impossible to have an honest conversation about global warming…. We need more candor. Unless we develop cost-effective technologies that break the link between carbon-dioxide emissions and energy use, we can’t do much. Anyone serious about global warming must focus on technology-and not just assume it. Otherwise, our practical choices are all bad: costly mandates and controls that harm the economy; or costly mandates and controls that barely affect greenhouse gases. Or, possibly, both.
–Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, 13 November 2006

You cannot tell people who are struggling to earn enough to eat that they need to reduce their emissions.
–Lu Xuedu, China’s Office of Global Environmental Affairs, 30 October 2006

Stern’s headlined conclusions are intellectual fictions. They’re essentially fabrications to justify an aggressive anti-global-warming agenda. The danger of that is we’d end up with the worst of both worlds: a program that harms the economy without much cutting of greenhouse gases.
To check warming, Stern wants annual emissions 25 percent below current levels by 2050. The IEA projects that economic growth by 2050 would more than double emissions. At present, we can’t bridge that gap.

The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be, because we don’t know how much warming might occur, when, where, or how easily people might adapt. Stern’s horrific specter distills many of the most terrifying guesses, including some imagined for the 22nd century, and implies they’re imminent. The idea is to scare people while reassuring them that policies to avert calamity, if started now, would be fairly easy and inexpensive.
–Newsweek, 13 November 2006http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15563663/site/newsweek/

At times it has seemed as if the entire British debate on climate change has taken on the character of a pantomime, with lurid plots, grotesque caricatures, and stage villains.

In the world of grown-ups, the man who has probably thought more deeply than anyone else in this country about climate change is distinctly unamused. Professor Mike Hulme is the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the coordinating lead author of the chapter on “climate change scenarios” for the third assessment of the International Panel on Climate Change.

“Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country – the phenomenon of ‘catastrophic’ climate change'” wrote Prof. Hulme. “The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic’, ‘irreversible’ and ‘rapid’ has altered the public discourse [which] is now characterised by phrases such as ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate’ and ‘we are at the point of no return.'”

“Some recent examples of the catastrophists include Tony Blair, who [states] ‘We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing a catastrophic tipping point.’ Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science’s predictions? … By ‘sexing it up’ we exacerbate…the very risks we are trying to ward off. The careless (or conspiratorial?) translation of concern about Saddam Hussein’s putative military threat into the case for WMD has had major geopolitical repercussions. We need to make sure the agents in our society which would seek to amplify climate change risks do not lead us down a similar counter-productive pathway.”

Yet, even more worrying is the fundamental idea behind Stern, namely that, by enforcing such drastic economic measures, we will be able to control climate predictably. Climate is the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known, and it is intrinsically unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically convenient. Moreover, what climates are Tony Blair and Sir Nicholas hoping to produce? Will they be better? And when we get there, won’t they too change?

Therein rests the real inconvenient truth. Climate is like Glasgow on a Saturday night – a wee bit chaotic. We cannot manage it predictably by fiddling at the margins, however well-meaning Sir Nicholas’ efforts.

I believe Stern sets the wrong agendas, in that he mistreats uncertainty, so that the absence of knowledge justifies alarm, and he places an untoward faith in computer-generated prognostications rather than in real-world data and history. For the last 10 years, there has been no statistically-significant change in global mean temperature. Moreover, doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would, if all other factors remained constant, lead to only 1 degree C of warming. It is thus vital to remember that Stern’s panics reside with Lara Croft and the virtual world of the computer, and that climate models have overestimated the real-world warming by a factor of three. The models seem unable to cope with the key factors of water vapour and clouds.

First in our priorities must be dealing with poverty, dirty water, and disease. And then we must establish a world order that can support all, but especially the poor, to cope with, and to adapt to, inexorable change whatever its causes or directions. The rest, I fear, is the dangerous and misguided ecochondria of a rich North.

Stern has built a mighty economic edifice on shifting and unmanageable sands. I predict that Stern will sink quite quickly to join the now-forgotten Population Bomb and Limits to Growth, and many other such doomsday tracts.
SPLIT DEEPENS OVER POST-KYOTO: EUROPE RAISES THREAT OF TRADE WARS

A U.N. conference working to fix long-term rules to fight global warming
beyond 2012 “as soon as possible” was split on Tuesday over whether that
meant an accord should be struck in 2008, 2009 or even 2010…. Yvo de
Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said Nairobi will not
launch formal negotiations to replace Kyoto — that will have to wait
until the next meeting in 2007. He said a new deal might not be ready
until 2010.
–Reuters, 7 November 2006

[Italian Environment Minister] Pecoraro Scanio said Europe should no
longer accept that position and suggested the threat of trade sanctions
against both the United States, and major exporters like China and
India, should they refuse to accept emissions cuts. “We have asked the
European Union to do something at the World Trade Organisation on
environmental dumping for those countries which do not cut CO2,” he
said. The aim would be to impose import duties on goods from countries
which are not cutting emissions, said the minister. India and China can
no longer refuse cuts on the basis that rich countries must act first,
Pecoraro Scanio said. “Now they are becoming rich. So they should
absolutely have to start making a contribution.”
–Reuters, 7 November 2006

For fundamentalists, few sins are more grave than that of apostasy. So spare a thought for Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia, who has gone over to the Dark Side and spoken out about scare-mongering over global warming.

According to Prof Hulme, the climate change debate has become “negative, depressive and reactionary”, with environmentalists vying to find ever more apocalyptic visions of the future. He singles out Tony Blair and government scientists for perpetuating the most egregious claims about the impact of global warming, and accuses The Independent of indulging in “megaphone journalism”.

Coming from the director of the respected Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, this may sound like Ian Paisley saying the IRA deserve a hearing. In fact, Prof Hulme has not changed his belief in the reality or seriousness of climate change. He has simply had enough of eco-fundamentalists hijacking the scientific agenda.

He is not alone. Dr Tim Palmer, one of Britain’s leading experts on climate modelling, last week also warned that “hyping can be dangerously counter-productive”.

Criticism of posturing politicians and right-on journalists is certainly richly deserved. Their scaremongering runs a real risk of convincing reasonable people it is simply too late to avoid climatic calamity.

But there has been no shortage of academics all too happy to talk up the threats in the belief that the end justifies the means. Way back in the late 1980s, the influential climate change expert Prof Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, confessed: “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” He added that he hoped there was a balance between between “being effective and being honest”.

Twenty years on, he and his fellow climate scientists are struggling to be either.

zoot, it is a good enough analogy. Any journal that has a policy of rejecting contributions on the sole basis that they buck the prevailing wisdom should state so publicly, and then see how much respect they get.

Scientists can only give an assessment of the possible outcomes for global warming from CO2 emissions. The concensus view is that there will be global warming and that it is likely to impose serious costs. If the range of current scientific opinion was reflected in probable outcomes we could, for example, say:
-10% chance that there will be no serious cost of global warming
-20% chance of a small cost of global warming
-60% chance of serious costs of global warming
-10% chance of very serious costs including those associated with tipping points, catastrophe etc.
(These are just figures for illustrative purposes and reflect the scientific consensus – I don’t have a precise idea of what the probabilities are.)

Faced with this information what should do we do?

Scientists should continue research to get a more precise estimate of the probabilities and get more certainty about the possible effects and the probabilities that they will occur. That has been happening for two decades and over time the consensus has become progressively stronger.

Economists should be arguing that market mechanisms need to be put in place so that the costs of carbon emissions are taken into account in all economic decisions. At present we have no mechanisms, which would only make sense if there was a 100% chance of no serious costs.

And Chris Nobody thinks that if the composition by volume (not moles) of the atmosphere changes by 100 ppmv in one component, the rest by ppmv are not affected. I’ll give you my bank account details and await your generous donations as they will not reduce your account. O brave new math!

Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong: “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

I told you why the comment wasn’t biased. You told me that it was inappropriate because it was biased, without furether argument. I’ve noticed that when things get uncomfortable for you, you always stop offering arguments. BTW, don’t bother replying (at least for my sake anyway). I’ve decided, for the sake of my blood pressure, to ignore your comments from now on. I don’t think you’re a troll. I do think you need to learn some epistemic humility.

ToS: why pretend to an understanding of atmospheric physics that you self-evidently do not have, and do it in print just to make sure everybody knows it?! Do you do the same sort of thing in economics? Your paragraph that contains the sentence “JQ tells us to submit to Nature, which is probably wholly staffed by old mates or sycophants of Houghton” doesn’t get much more obnoxious than that, but it does get even sillier. I reckon you’d have learnt in the past to be careful with your bluffing in economics debates – you don’t really believe that physics is an easier bluff than economics do you?

BTW there’d be a few people watching you I think, after the nastiness of your comment a month ago at Deltoid. Which I’m going to quote from now.

However if it was the Lancet’s 600,000++, unless diminishing returns to the killers (almost all Iraqis) set in, since most victims are men, within 10 years the problem will have been solved by removal of almost the total adult male population to all those virgins in the sky.

Almost all Iraqis are killers is it? I won’t be wasting any time teaching school level atmospheric physics to you, dipshit.

Taking up the matter of the philosophy of science which is one of John’s hobbies, this post was written for Weekend Reflections but no box comes up on my screen. The same applies to the Rememberance Day thread and some others, but not this one.

Bertrand Russell became suspicious of a major and famous philosopher when he read something that the man wrote about mathematics. Hitherto Russell had been willing give him the benefit of the doubt on many issues but that gap in his credibility opened a floodgate. In this case the issue that has exposed John to serious doubt is his claim that Lakatos either located major and unresolved problems in Popper’s views or that he improved on Popper in some significant way.

John has been too busy or too unwilling to explain his positon Alan Saunders on ABC radio did a program on Lakatos which illuminates the situation. This program shows how the problem has been shifted in a degenerative manner under the influence of the idea that there should be some logical criterion to distinguish the gold of science from the dross of pseudoscience. The quest for this criterion has been unhelpful on two counts (a) it did not succeed and this has led to widespread skepticism regarding science and reason (b) the quest diverted attention from the more helpful and important task of assessing the merits of alternative theories, using evidence as effectively as possible in the process.

Alan Saunders studied philosophy at the London School of Economics and one of his teachers was John Worral. Recently he did a program on Imre Lakatos, including an interview with Worral who was a favorite student of Lakatos. This is the transcript of the program.

Lakatos was a lapsed Marxist and when he reached England he became a bitter critic of Marxism. He saw the battle with Marxism very much in terms of defending science from pseudoscience. This put him in line with the positivists although he followed Popper in some ways and never tried to make the distinction in terms of meaning.

He wrote â€œThe Communist Party persecuted Mendelians on the ground that their doctrines were pseudoscientific. But then the problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not merely a problem of armchair philosophy, it is of vital social and political relevanceâ€œ.

Formulating the basic problem

Actually this formulation of the problem is unfortunate and consequently most of the literature that has raged over the implications of Popperâ€™s demarcation criterion has generated more heat than light. Popper was partly to blame by his own committment to the idea that the problem of demarcation is fundamental. However the more important issue is the capacity of theories to solve problems (whatever the problems may be, in science or in public policy) and to stand up to criticism and it is not really an issue whether they are classified as scientific because that is a matter of definition.

The most helpful way to think about Popperâ€™s views on falsification is to see them as a commentary on the most effective way to use evidence. It is about evidence, not a definition of science or a theory of knowledge. Popperâ€™s theory of knowledge is best called a non-authoritarian theory of conjectural objective knowledge and it it is very misleading to label it falsificationism because that only concerns a part of a larger structure of ideas about the nature of epistemic authority and the objective status of public knowledge in addition to subjective beliefs which are the focus of most epistemologies.

The focus on science

The definition of science became all important under the influence of the false theory that there was some way to establish scientific theories as â€œjustified true beliefsâ€œ. Admittedly the problem shifted from conclusive justification to probability but in the hands of the positivists that was no improvement and the basic â€œjustificationistâ€? motivation remained in place.

Alan Saunders introduced the modern debate over the nature of science with Popperâ€™s 1934 message that a single recalcitrant fact can sink a theory. Actually that is not original to Popper but never mind, it was original in the context of the positivistsâ€™ concerns with verification as the criterion of meaning and scientific status. So on the Saunders account â€œit is not by proving our theories that we make scientific progress; it is by arriving at theories so bold that they can be disproved. When a theory is disproved, we know weâ€™re getting somewhere.â€?

It is more helpful to say that we make progress when we invent a better theory and it proves its mettle by standing up to tests. Disproving a theory counts as progress in several different ways (1) by the elimination of error, (2) narrowing the field of search for better theories and (3) creating new problems which are the growing points of learning.

Saunders on Lakatos

Saunders then quoted a passage from Lakatos that confused the issue with a correct observation – that scientists do not necessarily abandon a theory because facts contradict it – followed by the false conclusion that this invalidated Popperâ€™s views on the most effective way to use evidence. Lakatos appealed to history to trump Popper on logic and methodology but Popper was perfectly well aware of the evasive tactics that can he used. His response was to formulate rules of the game to maximise the exposure of theories to tests and to sort out who is playing the game and who is not. So is is not a matter of demarcating â€œscienceâ€? in the abstract but instead it is an invitation to work out whether particular theories are potentially testable and whether people are interested in testing them.

This shows the importance of the check on the problem. Popperâ€™s problem was to formulate methods that would maximise criticism and economise the use of evidence which can be very expensive and time-consuming to obtain. It is not a refutation of his proposals to point out that some, many or even all people donâ€™t want to be bothered with criticism.

Enter Kuhn

Saunders repeated the same (non) criticism of Popper, with attribution to Kuhn, and this was supported by Worral. â€œWhat Kuhn was saying was that rather than this sort of neat, sharp picture that Popper was providing of you lay on your couch (sic), you formulate a conjecture, you test that conjecture against evidence and if it survives, then you give it a tickâ€¦if it doesnâ€™t survive, then you reject it and you go back to your couch to come up with a new conjecture. What Kuhn pointed out was that this is historically importantly false.â€?

It is possible to find episodes in the history of science where refutations were rapidly accepted as decisive but that is not really the point, which is that Kuhn/Saunders/Worral have created a straw Popper, like the naive falsificationist Popper who never existed but was useful for Lakatos in his polemics.

Popper described science as a human activity whereby people do their best to advance knowledge by groping in the dark. Logic has a role to play, along with evidence, mathematical calculations, metaphysical speculations, and all the human passions, including the less noble ones, often enough writ large.

He was well aware that observations which appear to contradict theories need to be checked and they need to stand up to counter-arguments. That is why he made the distinction between FALSIFIABILITY (the possibility that a statment could be falsified by a true observation statement) and FALSIFICATION which which takes account of the practical difficulties of obtaining true observation statements and other considerations. So that falsification is inevitably conjectural due to the theory-dependence of observations, the fallibility of observers and experimental equipment, the Duhem problem etc.

Popper on dogmatism

He even went to far as to say that there is a methodological justification for a degree of dogmatism to hang onto a theory in the face of some objections, simply to keep it in the game long enought to find out whether it can be developed instead of throwing it away at the first sign of trouble. Bartley pointed out that the notion of dogmatism is not very helpful in that context, it is enough to say that theories are rendered problematic by contrary evidence and other shortcomings. That just means that more work is required to explore the nature of the problems, to find whether they can be overcome by effective modifications to the theory or by counter-arguments that demolish the credibility of the contrary evidence.

When Popperâ€™s views on the use of evidence are understood in their most robust and helpful form, related to the problems that they were formulated to address, it can be seen that the objections advanced by Kuhn and Lakatos do not fly. Recognition of that simple fact could have saved a great deal of wasted effort in the history and philosophy of science over the last four or five decades.

What value have Kuhn and Lakatos added?

It has been argued that Popperâ€™s account is inadequate because he did not pay attention to the history, psychology and sociology of science, so Kuhn and Lakatos done well to advance the discussion past the point where Popper left it, whether or not he is correct on his own topics of interest.

It that is the case it would have helped if Kuhn and Lakatos had acknowledged what was correct in Popper instead of giving the impression that they had refuted his basic ideas, root and branch. In fact Kuhn did make a major concession in a little-repeated statement in his essay in Criticism and the Growth of Knoweldge, (eds Lakatos and Musgrave, page 247). â€œEven in the developed sciences, there is an essential role for Sir Karlâ€™s methodology. It is the strategy appropriate to those occasions when something goes wrong with normal science, when the discipline encounters crisisâ€?.

Kuhn was only interested in the crisis preceding revolutions while in contrast for Popper there are mini-crises (open problems, called puzzles by Kuhn) all over the place, depending on the capacity of scientists to be critical and exercise â€œthe sense of wonderâ€? about the work that remains to be done on unsolved problems.

Popper actually sold himself short in defending his work on demarcation because he had the ideas in hand to outflank the opposition with a more effective rejoinder to their positive programs, so far as they had positive programs to offer. The paradigms of Kuhn and the research programs of Lakatos can be seen as rather unhelpful formulations of the notion of metaphysical research programs that Popper propounded in the 1950s while he revised his first book. These take account of the programmatic nature of scientific research that Lakatos addressed with his methodology of programs. Recall that Lakatos had accces to everything that Popper wrote on MRPs because it was circulating around the London School of Economics in drafts and ms form for thirty years before it was eventually published in the third volume of The Postscript to the LSD.

The ideas in the MRPs can also stand in for the historical and psychological elements of Kuhnâ€™s paradigms, thought they provide more accessible handles for criticism to eliminate error and make progress. It has yet to be demonstrated how Kuhnâ€™s ideas (or those of Lakatos) actually help working scientists to be more effective as scientists.

The same may be said of Popperâ€™s MRPs at the moment but the point is that paradigms and MSRP have been taken up by thousands of people for decades and I am not aware of anyone of note who has mounted a serious effort to make use of the theory of MRPs to systematically advance some area of scientific research.

“It’s the economy stupid.” Ahem, I think that line is growing old and musty. Everything is interrelated. The environment affects the economy and the economy affects the economy. A lot of modern economist just talk about growth, as if we didn’t live within a closed system. Unfortunately, many of these so called economist think that sustainability is a dirty word. But I guess when instant riches are in the offing, you would think that way.

You cannot criticise the science, imperfect as some of it may be, the foundations are good and solid, and thereby rest all the other disciplines we rely on to guide us into the future. Mother Nature has many more secrets than we think and does not give a fig for science, economics, politics, sociology, theology or any other discipline, standby by for the perfect storm, beginning in 2007. For the denialists, your right the world will still be here, problem is we will not be. JQ, Perhaps this belongs in another thread.

Neil, there is no reason for your blood pressure to go up. I just disagree with you.

You said:

â€œGenerally, well-established methodologies do not employ obvious fallacies or any other errors that can be very easily demonstrated. Hence there is a second reason for rejection: that the paper likely does not achieve its aim.â€?

I completely agree that one should assign a low prior probability of correctness to any paper that claims to expose obvious fallacies in well-established methodologies. When I review a paper that makes such claims, I focus more energetically on finding the error in the authors’ reasoning. If I find the error, that becomes the reason for rejection. In the very rare case that I don’t find such an error, I then think carefully how smart people could have been wrong all along. Once I understand how we got it wrong, I recommend acceptance (assuming the paper is otherwise ok). But in no case do I recommend rejection on the basis that the “paper likely does not achieve its aim”, ie based on my prior bias that such claims are unlikely to be true. That is not a good enough reason, and Annan was perfectly right to object.

I think point is that a paper that challenges ‘well established methodologies’ should not be submitted to Nature as “Brief Communications Arising”. If you want to challenge a paradigm you need to make a substantive case not just criticize someone else’s work.

Rafe, I explained my position at length and you just repeated yourself, as numerous commenters pointed out to you. However I’m interested in the claim that “Lakatos [failed to acknowledge] what was correct in Popper instead giving the impression that [he] had refuted his basic ideas, root and branch”. Can you give some citations to support this?

Rafe and JQ: what are the testable propositions of the IPCC and Nick Stern & co which have so far not been refuted? I have read a fair bit in this area over the last couple of years and have yet to find R2 and ts in any cited papers that bear close examination. For example, what is the precise relationship between fossil fuel burning and reported higher temperatures, with R2 and t? When simple correlations between increasing CO2 and temperature rises over 250 years produce nothing inconsistent with a nul hypothesis, bring on the multiple regressions! But where are they? Not on this site.

John, I am repeating myself because I think you have persisted in the misleading belief that there is a problem with Poppers views that need to be improved upon, perhaps along the lines suggested by Lakatos. I appreciate that policing Popper’s ideas is a slightly eccentic hobby but for some reason that I wish the sociology of knowledge would illuminate, people have decided that it is ok to take huge liberties with his ideas and so misleading misrepresentations circulate widely. Of course it is only worthwhile to challenge these things if Popper’s ideas at the core are good enough to make a difference. I think they are. And so, once more to the breach!

You wrote (16 Sept)

“On Popper, I think the big problem is that his falsificationist approach, taken literally, suggests that a research program can be rejected on the basis of a single â€œcrucial experimentâ€?. As Popper himself recognised, this isnâ€™t true and Lakatosâ€™ treatment of scientific research programs seems to me to be the best available resolution. I find Lakatosâ€™ ideas useful in my own work.”

Reply: “The core of Popperâ€™s approach is criticism, and attempted falsification is a part of that critical method. The question is, what is wrong with Popperâ€™s views that was identified and corrected by Lakatos?”

To which I would add today that the invalid critiques of Popper by Lakatos and Kuhn were widely and uncritically used to eject Popper from the main game in the 1970s.

JQ “Iâ€™ll restate my point about Popper and Lakatos. If you accept that a single apparent falsification of a hypothesis canâ€™t in general be conclusive, youâ€™re left with the problem of finding an operational basis for critical assessment of theories. The best available answer to this problem, in my view, is that given by Lakatosâ€™ theory of Scientific Research Programs. If you think thereâ€™s a better answer point to it and say why you think itâ€™s better. So far, all youâ€™ve offered is unsupported abuse and, apparently, a claim that the field stopped with Popper.”

John, you still seem to think that falsification is the heart and soul of Popper’s views on methodology when it was merely his rejoinder to the unhelpful views of the positivists on verification. We need to move on from the problem of demarcation between science and non-science where all this bogged down, assisted by Popper himself who made too much of the issue.

I don’t understand how Lakatos has helped working economists. The two Greek Island conferences on Lakatos came up empty in that respect. I know that Lakatos provided some interesting terminology but I don’t see how he provided any handles onto the unstated assumptions that cause problems for research programs. That is where I think that Popper is potentially more helpful with his stuff on metaphysical research programs.

It will not be included in the published proceedings which will appear any month now because it ran into a referee who is a clone of Byran Kaplan, a robust critic of the Austrians. Still, I know enought about the history of ideas to realise that this is what is supposed to happen.

“As Lakatos has pointed out, Popper’s theory of demarcation hinges quite fundamentally on the assumption that there are such things as critical tests, which either falsify a theory, or give it a strong measure of corroboration”

and ends

“Popper’s distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology does not in the end do full justice to the fact that all high-level theories grow and live despite the existence of anomalies (i.e., events/phenomena which are incompatible with the theories). The existence of such anomalies is not usually taken by the working scientist as an indication that the theory in question is false; on the contrary, he will usually, and necessarily, assume that the auxiliary hypotheses which are associated with the theory can be modified to incorporate, and explain, existing anomalies.”

Maybe experts like Thornton are wrong, but I’ll have to ask you to take it up with them, rather than me. If you can convince them, I’ll certainly review my own position.

Kyangdac, Annan’s brief communcation does make a substantive case. I think Nature’s excuse for rejection (without review) was not great – it amounts to: “if we were to publish your brief communication arising for this paper, we’d have to do it for a lot of other papers too”.

proust, maybe you are not aware of this, but I believe the rejection rate without review for Nature is over 95%. Even they acknowledge failures in the system (there is an article from a few years back noting they initially knocked back the two most cited papers of all time in chemistry), however, unless they start publishing piles of garbage and piles of not exceptionally interestnig stuff (and finding reviewers for them), there isn’t much alternative to such a system.

One of the main ways to get published in the journal in areas of controversy where best of the best cannot be clearly demarcated (which is most areas) is to write a big really good article in the top journal of your area that everyone agrees is good and new and then send some portion of the interesting to results to Nature. So there is your solution.

I would contest that at least insofar as climate science is concerned, Nature are already publishing piles of garbage. Annan’s point is precisely that: Nature have published paper after paper claiming wacky bounds for climate sensitivity, and according to editor Nicki Stevens, they plan to carry on doing so because that’s the way it has always been.

When such bounds underpin public policy as in the Stern report, it is incumbant on Nature to at some point publish a dissenting opinion, or to at least review a dissenting paper.

proust – “I would contest that at least insofar as climate science is concerned, Nature are already publishing piles of garbage.”

Says who? What qualifications do you have to say that Nature are publishing piles of garbage on climate change? Have you read and understood it all. I don’t know who you are – are you a peer reviewer on climate science?

“Nature have published paper after paper claiming wacky bounds for climate sensitivity, and according to editor Nicki Stevens, they plan to carry on doing so because thatâ€™s the way it has always been.”

Show us the papers then. As far as I can see James Annan has come up with a method of constraining climate sensitivity using statistical methods from past events. That does not mean all the others are wrong. One study or paper does not mean that all the others are incorrect and this is what the editor of Nature basically said. James has published in many peer reviewed scientific journals.

I think Nature should be able to publish/accept whatever they want — if you don’t like that, then too bad, go publish somewhere else. There are heaps of journals out them, many with different scientfic criteria for acceptance. In addition, I’d don’t know the answer to it, but I’m sure they have rejected many many dissenting opinions (and for that matter, alternative potentially non-dissenting models). Why would you think they hadn’t?

If you have a killer model that is so much better than the rest, I’m sure you’ll get it published. Alternatively, if you have a pile of garbage, then rejecting it is clearly the correct decision. If they published every piece of junk, then people wouldn’t bother reading it.

There’s a reason Nature gets such a huge number of submissions: in many fields it is the most prestigious journal in which to publish. A paper in Nature does wonders for your academic career, and carries more weight amongst policy makers. Therefore, it is important that Nature be willing to correct any previous errors; doubly so in climate science given the political sensitivity of the subject.

“We really have descended into what passes for science and math in England and Australia. If CO2 has increased by 100 ppm since 1750, then non-CO2 must have decreased by 100 ppm since 1750. The IPCC says that 1 ppm CO2 equals 7.8 billion tonnes CO2 in the global atmosphere, therefore it also equals c.7.8 billion tonnes non-CO2 in the global atmosphere.

So for an increase of 100 ppm CO2 since 1750 we have 780 bn tonnes of CO2 increment in the global atmosphere since then and 780 billion tonnes of non-CO2 decrement since 1750. What happened to it?

The ludicrous GCM models of the IPCC simply like the philistine walk by the other side of the road. If the GCM cannot/do not account for the missing 780 billion tonnes of non-CO2 they have to be worthless as indeed they are.”

Chris wilfully left out the c. (for an ignoramus like Chris “c” stands for “circa”, which he will not know stands for “about”). Clearly Tim knew there was not an exact match between more CO2 AND LESS Non-CO2. Next question: why if CO2 in ppmv (all here apart from Chris know that v stands for volume) has gone up by 100 since whenever, what has gone down IN PPMV, which is what I think Tim was asking. If it is water vapor, with its alleged positive feedback effect, then as CO2 increases, H2O decreases, and so the positive feedback diminishes (but I fear that is beyond the level of year 10 math that Victorian Chris says he has attained).

I apologise for the asperity, but Chris No-address consistently abuses all contrarians of his very narrow view of the world.

More positively, Ben Selinger, who unlike Chris has some standing as a former professor of chemistry at the ANU, has noted in today’s Canberra Times that the so-called “greenhouse” effect (which as he says is a misnomer)is really a question of the absence of ventilation in the greenhouse (which has walls as well as a glass roof). It may well be news to Chris, but the atmosphere has no walls, and no roof, and the CO2 (in 380 ppmv or 0.03% of the total) is a poor substitute for a roof which is 100% glass. The infrared radiation back to space which underpins the total IPCC model is hardly likely to be seriously incommoded by a “roof” which is a mere 0.03% of the atmosphere (by ppmv if Chris can get his mind around that concept, he seems to have difficulty in distinguishing between weights and volumes). More so when an increase in CO2 by ppmv has to be offset by a decline in H2O by ppmv, the larger GHG according to IPCC.

Hint: visualise an array of 1 million pixels of which 380 are CO2. How much infrared radiation will those 380 ppmv stop vis a vis the amount allowed through by the 999,620 of non-CO2? I think we should be told.

And I think we should also be told why a greenhouse with walls and a glass roof that prevent airflow between the interior and the exterior are an exact model of the world and its atmosphere as we know it.

Readers should note that, despite the implications to the contrary, Tam is a sock-puppet for Tim. JQ

Tam, if CO2 mixes well throughout the atmosphere (which I believe is the case), then a doubling of CO2 from 0.03% to 0.06% by volume should result in a uniform relative reduction by 0.03% of all other gases, unless there is a mechanism by which CO2 displaces specific gases preferentially (I doubt it).

A 0.03% reduction is not going to be significant, or even measurable. For example, it means NO2 (another greenhouse gas) will be reduced from 314 ppbv (that’s parts per billion by volume) to about 313.9 ppbv.

Proust: as ever to the point! However we need to consider (as Houghton and the IPCC never do) what happens when atmospheric CO2 is created. If it arises from burning hydrocarbons (= fossil fuels) then the burning process uses oxygen plus carbon and releases H2O and CO2 etc. Has there ever been a measurement to show declining oxygen since say 1750? I suspect that all we have is a marginal redistribution within the 0.1 % by ppmv that is not oxygen, nitrogen, and argon. But if there is a decline in oxygen, why has nobody noticed?

Not being a climate physicist, I don’t know enough climate change to comment on Annan’s work. Alternatively, I do know that Nature does allow errors to be corrected (there is in fact a note about it this very week), so if there was a clear error made, then a correction could be published, which hasn’t happened.

Like I said before, if you (or any of the other global warming denialists) are really smart enough to be talking about what you are talking about and have good evidence for that, then the answer to your problems are simple. If Nature, who has access to the best reviewers in the field, happens to reject you because that is not the case, then you should try to get better evidence or more convincing arguments rather than just whining about stuff getting rejected.

Annan’s paper was rejected by Nature without review because it disagreed with previously published results of “the best reviewers in the fields”.

Conrad, your arguments amount to “Nature can’t be the problem, it must be Annan” even though, as you admit, you know nothing about Annan’s work. I think that narrows the posterior distribution on the value of your opinion on this subject.

Annan published his initial results in GRL – a decent journal, after they were rejected by Nature. He is now trying to correct the series of wacky climate sensitivity claims coming out of Nature. Of course Nature will resist that – to accept his papers will be to admit they published alarmist stuff.

Since you aren’t a climate physicist either proust, as you comment above, I find your comment a bit odd. Why would I trust your opinion over the scientific process, editors/board at Nature?

Everybody complains about getting their papers rejected (in every field), and I can’t see why this is any different. It sounds like just more whinging from whingers. If you don’t like the way Nature is run, you don’t have to publish there. Why not try Science or PNAS, if these ideas are so good? I’m sure those journals would just love to have a super high impact paper that attracts world-wide publicity. If they reject the paper also, then that should tell you something about the value of the contribution.

Tam, how many O2 molecules are consumed for each CO2 molecule generated when burning fossil fuels? And what volume does an O2 molecule displace in the atmosphere relative to a CO2 molecule?

Call the first number N and the second number X. If CO2 goes up by 0.03% ppmv as a result of fossil fuel burning, O2 will reduce by 0.03% * N * X ppmv. Eg, if N=1 and X=1 (not the correct numbers I am sure), O2 will reduce from 20.95% ppmv to 20.94% ppmv.

Is that measurable? Probably, given that O2 concentration is already quoted to 2 decimal places in the literature. Does it make any difference to global warming? Very unlikely.

Now, if burning fossil fuels to produce CO2 is some kind of cataytic process that sucks up way more O2 that CO2 consumed (so N is large), then you’d expect a bigger change in O2 – but I don’t think that is the case.

As for H2O – because it is liquid at Earth temperatures and we have a big store of it in the oceans, its atmospheric concentration should be determined by the partial pressure of water vapour rather than any “concentration” of water in the atmosphere. That is, even if burning fossil fuels generated tons of H2O, the water would tend to go into the oceans, not into the atmosphere.

Proust: many thanks, ’tis as I suspected. BTW, did you see that ABC news and 7.30 Report last night showed no fewer than five shots of power station cooling towers belching out white vapour with the clear intent that we are to think that is the troublesome carbon dioxide. Actually it is water vapour of course, and surely only beneficial in this drought. No doubt it goes up initially but comes down eventually as you say, nevertheless it is deemed (by Stern) to be a harmful GHG! Stern also states repeatedly that deforestation per se releases carbon dioxide. He can be forgiven as chemistry is no longer much taught in Britain, and not at all at Kings College, across the road from LSE, even tho’ that is where the double helix was first observed, but it shows the quality of his internal peer review that he can produce this kind of garbage: “…when trees are cut down the stored carbon oxidises and escapes back into teh atmosphere as CO2…” (Ch.25, p.537). Yet here am I at my teak desk, and it appears not to have shrunk (as in Alice in Wonderland) since I bought it 7 years ago despite all that oxidation going on. Stern is also unaware that if land is cleared of trees for other agricultural purposes the new crops and pastures absorb carbon dioxide on an ongoing basis.

Stern’s zero discount rate is likewise fallacious (see Richard Cooper in the FT’s Wolf Forum at www.http://ftblogs.typepad.com/wolfforum/) – Cooper could have added that the Stern/Wolf view derives from the Koran and investment theory as applied in the Soviet Union (which also opted for zero discount rates with less than optimal outcomes).

JQ frequently dismisses an opus if it contains a single error. With its many major blunders in addition to the howler on tree felling the Stern report should be dismissed in its entirety as worthless and recycled into a more useful paper product.

Deforestation is bad (okay?) for a number of reasons, including its minor effect on the carbon cycle. One can, theoretically, nullify the effect of deforestation on the carbon cycle by planting trees, one for one, as is done in sustainable forests. The main culprit for AGW is the combustion of fossil fuels (coal and oil) which cannot realistically be replenished by planting more trees.
As for what gas is replaced by CO2, surely it is O2, one for one on a molar basis (because 12g of carbon plus 32g of oxygen gives 44g CO2), eh? The water balance is more difficult because of its ability to condense into liquid (rain), but if the temperature rises (for whatever reason) the water carrying capability of air also increases and H2O (vap) is a GHG – hence the positive feedback which has been, I’m pretty sure, taken into account in all the models.

Of course I didn’t read Annan. As I pointed, myself, like 99.99% of people (including you), are not climate physists and don’t spend all our time thinking about it, and nor neccesarily even have the aptitude to understand the issues even if we did spend 100% of our time thinking about it. Therefore I don’t have the knowledge to judge between good and bad papers on the issue of global warming (which involves an extremely complex non-linear system). Thus reading about the physics behind it all is pointless to me (aside form the issue of it being an interesting matehmatical modeling exersize, which is of interest to me).

Alternatively, Nature magazine does have access to such people for reviews, and hence I put my faith in them. If Annan happens to get a few papers in Science, PNAS and the like and gets taken seriously, I’ll admit that the Nature reviews process didn’t work well in that case.

Climate Science is not that difficult as sciences go: if you have a strong math and physics background it is easy to understand, except where they obfuscate (and there’s a lot of that). Climate Scientists as a group are particularly weak when it comes to statistics, which is where Annan’s contribution comes in.

Conrad Years ago (in 1986) we went on our European Vacation and all the talk in the press was about the acid rain killing the forests of Germany.Well there we were in the middle of the Black Forest(cue music) and we picked up a german hitch hiker. We casually asked him “So where are all these dead trees?” He said “I don’t know but the experts do”
Does this sound familiar?
I believe the black forest is still there!

Proust, I do have some of that background (and a fair few of my friends do to). However, I don’t find the physics easy to understand, and none of my friends admitted to that either, so evidentally a lot of people must be smarter than me and them, which is somewhat surprising, since many of us use applied mathematics and statistics publishing stuff (and two of the people I asked have published in the journal you are complaining Annan can’t get into).

chrisl. Despite your anecdote, the black forest is damaged by acid rain (compare the health of it vs. some of the forests in Canada). In any case, here are some things people tried to deny for a long time also: HIV, the hole in the ozone layer, and cancer from cigarette smoking. There are now a lot of dead people because of this, and a big hole in the ozone layer. If only we had listened to the experts earlier.

“In any case, here are some things people tried to deny for a long time also: HIV, the hole in the ozone layer, and cancer from cigarette smoking.’

In the case of the second and third, not just “people”, but the very same people who are now denying global warming, including (for the ozone layer) Baliunas and Michaels, for the dangers of smoking, particularly passive smoking, the IPA and Lindzen and for the trifecta (passive smoking, ozone layer and global warming), Singer, Seitz and Milloy.

Conrad, with your background you should have no trouble reading Annan’s paper on climate sensitivity and his Brief Communication Arising to Nature. So why don’t you do that so we can have an informed debate, instead of all this peripheral discussion?

You allude to a maths and stats background. Do you also have a physics background? And your friends? I’d be very surprised if someone with a PhD in theoretical physics would find the physics in climate science difficult.

What do you find difficult about the physics of say, GCMs? It’s basic fluid dynamics (Navier Stokes) and thermodynamics. I can help you out if you have a specific question.

“In the case of the second and third, not just â€œpeopleâ€?, but the very same people who are now denying global warming”

It’s fascinating the extent to which the pro AGW crowd focus almost exclusively on people, not science. Stop speculating about what’s inside the book based on its cover; open the damn thing and read it!

Taking up the discussion of Popper and Lakatos, John has referred to the broadly positive article on Popper in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to support his view that Lakatos identified a serious problem with Popper’s account of scientific method. He has suggested that I should take the matter up with Stephen Thornton, the author of the article, and come back when I have provided arguments that induce Thornton to change his mind.

This confirms my original thought that John did not rely on his own judgement in this matter. This is entirely understandable because he is an economist, not a philosopher of science. Life is too short to check out every single assumption that we have to make to get through the day. How many of us go under the house to check the report of a structural engineer or a pest inspector? How many of us do an inspection of the floor bearers each morning before we proceed to the kitchen for our Weet Bix to ensure that dry rot or termites have not rendered the floor unsafe overnight? But how reliable is our professional philosopher in this instance?

The request to get the professional to change his mind is likely to be a difficult assignment because Thornton has already been challenged by a contributor to the Critical Rationalist email group which used to run as an offshoot of the Critical Rationalist website. http://www.geocities.com/criticalrationalist/

The Thornton piece was discussed by the group and he was offered some carefully formulated criticism of parts of the article. He broke off the exchange when he found that some points in his email to the individual were mentioned on the list and he chose to regard that as a misuse of private correspondence.

I got the feeling that he was not receptive to criticism. That is unfortunate because there are inconsistencies between the body of his article and the concluding criticism (which is drawn practically verbatim from Lakatos). That criticism simply falls over, and this can be demonstrated fairly easily.

So the situation at present is that John is resting his position on advice from a person who has recycled a criticism of Popper from another source, despite the fact that the criticism in question is (a) contradicted in another part of his own paper and (b) refuted in my piece on the ABC philosophy show.

Too much focus on demarcation

If Thornton wanted to demonstrate his grasp of the issues and his also critical acumen he could have challenged Popper’s view that the problem of demarcation between science and non-science is fundamental. In some ways that is beside the point, for example the contest between Newton’s theory and Einstein’s theory was arguably the most important scientific episode in modern times, but they are both scientific theories. So what could a theory of demarcation contribute to that debate?

Scientists expect their theories to be testable in the same way that car buyers expect the steering wheel to come as standard equipment, not something that is offered as a bonus or a selling point or an optional extra.

I can’t explain why Popper was so hooked on the idea that demarcation was fundamental. It could be the result of his own intellectual history because the demarcation problem was his point of entry to other (in my view more important) problems, like the matter of induction which the positivists wanted to use as the hallmark of science.

Conflating demarcation and the growth of knowledge

In his discussion of induction and demarcation it seems that Thornton has collapsed two different but related issues into one. He wrote “Popper repudiates induction and rejects the view that it is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, and substitutes falsifiablility in its place”.

It will help to separate the two issues – one is the matter of demarcation and the other is the way that scientific knowledge grows. Popper and the positivists split on both issues:

On demarcation the split is between verification and falsification.
On the growth of knowledge the split is is induction vs the method of conjecture and refutation (trial and error).

Popper took issue with the verification criterion of meaning and he also (separately) took issue with the notion that knowledge grows by a process of induction (which has about five different definitions, just to confuse the issue, but Popper rejected all of them).

That is why it is so unhelpful to refer to Popper’s theory of knowledge as falsificationism.

Helpful comments from Thornton

Thornton did better when he wrote “Popper has always drawn a clear distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology [falsification]…Thus, while advocating falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation for science, Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomolous with them”.

He also did well in section 4 of the paper on the growth of human knowledge, where he emphasised the role of problems, the need for imaginative speculation disciplined by the tests of reason and evidence, the scientist as entrepreneur (an Austrian connection).

For my money the central problem in epistemology is not demarcation but the need to reconcile the complementary roles and functions of problem-situations, tradition, evidence, logic, reason, mathematics, metaphysics, scrutiny of definitions, intuition and anything else that turns up in the mix. And Popper’s theories, taken together, do perform that process of reconciliation instead of making too much out of particular components in the process and to attempt to establish some foundation of belief.

Strange criticism

In the light of the foregoing statements, especially this one “Popper explicitly allows for the fact that in practice a single conflicting or counter-instance is never sufficient methodologically to falsify a theory, and that scientific theories are often retained even though much of the available evidence conflicts with them, or is anomolous with them” it is strange to come to the following criticism at the end of the paper.

“As Lakatos has pointed out, Popper’s theory of demarcation hinges quite fundamentally on the assumption that there are such things as critical tests, which either falsify a theory, or give it a strong measure of corroboration.”

Lakatos claimed that but it is not the case because Popper clearly explained that falsification is inevitably conjectural (although some falsifications are so decisive that they are not really problematic in any practical sense). In principle, due to the theory-dependence of observations, all apparent refutations can be challenged or ignored and Popper’s position is not invalidated on that account.

After describing the discovery of Neptune as a triumph for Newton’s theory, by resolving an apparent anomaly, Thornton proceeded

“Yet Lakatos flatly denies that there are critical tests, in the Popperian sense, in science, and argues the point convincingly by turning the above example of an alleged critical test on its head. What, he asks, would have happened if Galle had not found the planet Neptune? Would Newtonian physics have been abandoned, or would Newton’s theory have been falsified?

The answer from Popper’s point of view is that Newtonian physics would not have been abandoned because there was no alternative theory of comparable scope to take its place. The anomalous planetary movement would be noted as an unresolved issue.

“The answer is clearly not, for Galle’s failure could have been attributed to any number of causes other than the falsity of Newtonian physics (e.g., the interference of the earth’s atmosphere with the telescope, the existence of an asteroid belt which hides the new planet from the earth, etc). The point here is that the ‘falsification/corroboration’ disjunction offered by Popper is far too logically neat: non-corroboration is not necessarily falsification, and falsification of a high-level scientific theory is never brought about by an isolated observation or set of observations.”

This is precisely what Popper himself pointed out in his discussion of the Duhem problem. Popper agreed with the problem that Duhem posed and he agreed with Duhem’s response the problem – there is no logical fix, that is just the way the world is, get over it and proceed with theory development and testing in the hope that the picture will become clearer.

“Popper’s distinction between the logic of falsifiability and its applied methodology does not in the end do full justice to the fact that all high-level theories grow and live despite the existence of anomalies (i.e., events/phenomena which are incompatible with the theories).”

That statement is simply false as Thornton acknowledged in the passage quoted above. Popper’s distinction does complete justice to the situation. This is an example of Popper’s own ideas being used as a bogus criticism of his own position.

Sad conclusion

So what is the outcome of all this? John Quiggin put his faith in a professional philosopher to tell him the truth about Popper’s theories and he was let down. The shocking truth of the matter is that the rank and file of professional philosophers cannot be relied on for a straight feed on Popper’s ideas. More research is required, but what discipline should be recruited for the task?

“Itâ€™s fascinating the extent to which the pro AGW crowd focus almost exclusively on people, not science.”

That’s because there isn’t any science on the other side. With a few exceptions (of the kind that prove the rule like the famous McKitrick-Michaels and Baliunas-Soon papers), the people I mentioned haven’t published any scientific work on this topic. Lindzen had a go with his adaptive iris stuff a few years back, but that got shot out of the water and he hasn’t come back AFAIK.

Of course, on the pro-science side of the debate the focus is on the thousands of scientific papers that support the scientific view and not on the personalities.

“Iâ€™d be very surprised if someone with a PhD in theoretical physics would find the physics in climate science difficult.

“What do you find difficult about the physics of say, GCMs? Itâ€™s basic fluid dynamics (Navier Stokes) and thermodynamics. I can help you out if you have a specific question.”

Interesting claims, Proust.

If you think fluid dynamics, and its interaction with thermodynamics (amongst other physical processes), is fairly straight forward, then perhaps you could give us the full explanation of the behaviour of a simple vortex tube?

Seeker, do you think Climate Scientists solve Navier Stokes where the rest of us mere mortals fail? Let me tell you: they don’t.

Yours is a classic misunderstanding of the difference between the equations and the solutions. Navier Stokes are simple equations, with generally intractable solutions. That simply means there are no “closed form” solutions; solutions in terms of other basic functions. But that is hardly unusual in physics: only in a very few idealized cases do closed form solutions exist.

At one level understanding the physics simply means understanding the basic equations, which I reiterate, are not that difficult. To “solve” those equations Climate Scientists have to build huge simulations, and to be sure there are complexities involved in the modeling, but at bottom the physics is basic fluid and thermo dynamics.

How much credibility do Nature and Scintific American have since they ran critical reviews of Lomborg’s book and did not allow him the right of reply?

That would appear to indicate both an intellectual and moral problem in that part of the scientific community which is taking the strong line on global warming. If their case is so strong they don’t need to play dirty pool to win the day.

I don’t know why John Quiggin thinks the debate is over, he probably thought the debate was over on the Popper vs Lakatos issue but that has demonstrated that the professionals in the field can’t be taken at face value without close scrutiny of their arguments. Who will be surprised if the same thing happens in the climate debate?

I can’t believe you’re banging on about Lomborg. He’s been ripped to shreds in terms of his scientific credibility. Certainly his personal credibility remains, AFAIK he is an honest author, but he sets up so many strawmen in his book and knocks them down of so successfully, and when the science gets hard he just glosses over the inconvenient counter evidence.

As JQ will remind you Lomborg is not a statistician. No degree in statistics you see. Maybe he is not an author either as he has no degree in literature.

I think his book was great. Not perfect but in the right ball park. Most authors that write a book that is design to sell a set of arguments construct a few straw men in the process. The whole “denialist” genre is a game of strawmen. They had to find a new dirty word because Lomborg made “skeptic” respectable.

If you want to read about the errors in Lomborgs book they are on his website:-

Having recently read Robin William’s repudiation of the ID theory – â€?Unintelligent Designâ€?), I was intrigued when I came across a passage about Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I had bought Hawking’s book about seven years ago and never made it past the third chapter, until I decided to complete it last year.

After finishing Hawking’s work, I felt much the same as I did after seeing the Jodie Foster movie “Contact”. It appeared to me that both the movie, and Hawking’s book had been positioned to accommodate as many belief systems as possible (for marketing purposes). According to Williams, Hawking has now walked away from some of the statements he made about the Anthropic Principle, in “A Brief History of Time”.

But I guess the introduction to Hawking book says it all. People believe what they want to believe in, including “Trojan Turkeys”.